


the quaking citadels of men

by bluebeholder



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Apocalypse, Bad Ending, High Chaos Corvo Attano, Minor Corvo Attano/The Outsider, Other, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 02:41:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20184901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: The Outsider, a god incarnate from a forgotten land, comes to a city by the sea.All hell breaks loose.





	the quaking citadels of men

**Author's Note:**

> Title from H.P. Lovecraft's "Fungi From Yuggoth."
> 
> This is not a nice fic.

A ship sails into the Bay, bedraggled, battered, missing most of its crew and the ship’s captain. The men who remain are raving mad from days on a becalmed sea, the sun beating upon them and only mirages filling their heads. Only two remain sane: Meagan Foster and Anton Sokolov, archaeologists disgraced and cast out by every reputable university.

Their ship was thought lost in a storm, but finally returned to land, triumphant. Its cargo is a thousand artifacts, jumbled in crates and scattered on decks. Bronze knives with twin blades, strange masks, machines of curious make. Foster and Sokolov have journals full of sketches and descriptions of a crumbling black city, lost in the ocean, where they were trapped for months. Every artifact, they claim, came from this unknown island city.

And from this place too comes the strangest object of all. He can only be called that, for they regard him as a curiosity, a curiosity to be revered. He is pale, the color of bleached whalebone, with blue-black veins running where his skin is thin on his wrists and neck and beneath his eyes. His hair, cut short, is sleek and dark, and he wears black clothes in an old-fashioned style that no one can quite place. His voice is smooth, sardonic, almost gentle. He holds his hands behind his back and moves with the easy glide of a seabird on water and wherever he goes his presence is like a drop of ink falling into a glass of water. The room simply stills, all eyes turning to him, for reasons no one can quite understand.

For days the front page of every paper bears a photograph of his face. Simple ink cannot quite convey the power the young man has, except that they perfectly show the abyssal black of his eyes. That is the eeriest thing about him, those eyes. For a while it is all the city can discuss: the black eyes of the young man who Foster and Sokolov claim is a god.

Meagan Foster returned from this expedition missing an eye and an arm; Anton Sokolov returned with his health forever broken, unable to go anywhere without a wheelchair. They both insist that their expedition was worth the toll that they have paid. “We have returned,” Sokolov says in a voice that still resounds like a hunting horn, “with the incarnation of a sleeping god. The Outsider walks among us!”

** _The Outsider walks among us!_ **

Those words haunt the city streets. Some laugh them derisively; some whisper in quiet awe. They are graffitied on buildings and streetcars. The magnetism of his person is compared to the great conquering Emperor of old, who is still remembered fondly despite having died more than a century earlier. One notary of the city is heard to remark that, if the Emperor had attracted ten thousand to his funeral, it is impossible to gauge just how many will pay their respects to the Outsider in the end.

Skeptics and spiritualists alike are drawn to the city. Some come to disprove and some come to disbelieve. Neither thing can be done. The Outsider refuses all examination and will not demonstrate a miracle, only smiles enigmatically when asked and speaks of other things. Skeptics come away from him believers, and believers come away as skeptics.

One thing upon which all can agree is that speaking to him is a disquieting experience. There is a sense that you’ve told the Outsider secrets you didn’t know you knew, and have now forgotten again. No one can ever remember just what he said. Nor can they remember if his mouth moved when he spoke.

They certainly can’t say whether or not he ever blinked.

By popular demand, Foster and Sokolov begin to give lectures. Their appearances at the Opera House are sold out every night, and their presence is demanded frequently at private clubs and the like. They discourse on their adventures and on their artifacts, depending on the audience; often, they can be persuaded to speak of the Outsider. The Outsider himself is in attendance frequently, always in a private box, where he sits and watches—not the lecturers, but the crowd.

Corvo Attano’s fiancée Jessamine Kaldwin is fascinated by this apparition. “Corvo, please!” she begs, eyes sparkling with fun. “My friends have gone to see the lectures, and one even met the Outsider himself. He’s fascinating—alluring, even to men—and I’m just burning to hear the mysteries Foster and Sokolov are supposed to unveil!”

Of course, Corvo can never say no to Jessamine. He’s hopeless for her, and so when she presents him with tickets to an evening lecture at the Opera House he can’t bear to say no. Corvo has misgivings, but when they arrive they are almost brushed away by the bright delight on Jessamine’s face.

Like all the other ladies, she is dressed for the evening. Corvo cannot take his eyes off her, gleaming in a gray gown that shows off the bare slope of her shoulders. She is an independent woman, the sole heir to old Euhorn Kaldwin’s railroad fortune, and Corvo counts himself impossibly lucky that Jessamine ever thought him worth a second look.

The Opera House is packed. Only one box is empty, and whispers have it that the Outsider will occupy that box tonight. Corvo is a little nervous of him, for reasons he can’t entirely explain; Jessamine, ever fearless, sits forward in her seat with bated breath as the lecturers make their appearance. Meagan Foster wears a man’s suit and a patch over her eye; Anton Sokolov propels his wheelchair with ferocity.

Both are compelling speakers. Corvo is rather enchanted, as they tell about the storm that wrecked them on the shores of the distant city—“not fabled R’lyeh,” Sokolov says, “but equally old and equally fearsome”—and give an overview of their days. Foster describes ancient monuments and shattered shrines, and Sokolov hypothesizes on ancient machines with unknown purpose. They show artifact after artifact, and it is only twenty minutes before the end of the lecture when the hall as one realizes that a new spectator has arrived.

The Outsider is in the box, though no one can say when he arrived.

“Was he there the whole time?” Jessamine whispers to Corvo, eyes wide, looking up at him.

“I don’t know,” Corvo says, staring at the pale young man sitting impassive in the box.

And then, without warning, the Outsider’s perfect black eyes meet Corvo’s.

Between one blink and the next, Corvo is standing outside the Opera House with Jessamine on his arm, talking excitedly of all they saw. His head is fuzzy, and he is dizzy, and he doesn’t know how or when they left. He looks around and sees the rest of the crowd, and perhaps—a flash of a thin smile.

He dreams of strange things that night as the songs of whales echo through his mind and the roar of the sea beats in his chest. He dreams of eyes and plague-ridden rats and sharp teeth in the depths of the abyss. And when he wakes he finds a mark on his hand, a sigil he cannot read. It’s black as pitch, black as the Outsider’s eyes.

The season is impossibly hot, for late February. The sun is unrelenting, baking the streets in a bizarre way. Storm clouds rise over the sea every day, but never quite make landfall. It feels as if lightning will strike at any moment, but it never does.

Unease fills the streets. Though the Outsider leaves the front page he is still a frequent topic of conversation. People are banned from churches for wearing curious talismans of whale bone, denounced as heretics and cultists. Famous spiritualists and scientists still come to examine him; still, no one leaves satisfied. The Outsider is an enigma.

Jessamine is in thrall to the Outsider. She attends as many lectures as she can, empties her fortune into auctions for the ancient treasures that Foster and Sokolov present for sale. Corvo goes along, helpless, and at every event the Outsider seems to make a point of meeting Corvo’s eyes, but never speaking to him once.

Corvo’s dreams grow ever more unsettled.

In conversation, the Outsider comments more than once that this season must end in the month of darkness. When pressed, he will not say what month that will be, nor why it is so significant. The words fill Corvo with dread.

A popular songwriter writes a ditty about the Outsider called “Born in the Month of Darkness” which is soon played on every piano in the city. It is supposed to be satirical, and at first it is rather funny, but eventually the lyrics begin to change of their own accord, becoming strange and unsettling, reminiscent of dark myths and darker dreams.

The lyrics remind Corvo of his maddening dreams, of which he can only ever remember fragments in the light of day. Whales, vast as islands. Howling wind. Dripping seawater. He takes to avoiding the waterfront and the pier, making every effort not to go near the bay. The ocean seems too dark, and the waves too high and threatening, and yet every time he sees the water he is tempted to dive in.

“Corvo,” Jessamine asks one day a they walk in the park, “are you all right?”

“I’m very well,” he says. The park is green and lush, shockingly verdant for the time of year. It shouldn’t be this warm, but Jessamine is wearing her spring dresses already.

Jessamine looks keenly at him. “You don’t seem well,” she says. Her next words shock him: “Have you been having dreams too?”

“Dreams?”

“I’ve had nightmares,” she confesses, sitting down on a bench, skirt draping elegantly over the seat. Corvo sits beside her, listening carefully. “Of a man in a mask…one of those artifacts, one I put a bid on at an auction.”

“Another artifact?”

Jessamine bites her lip. “I couldn’t help it,” she says. “It’s as if someone…told me to. And it’s a grotesque thing, Corvo, like a skull! And with these nightmares I fear I’ll be murdered in my bed!”

Corvo takes her hand. “I won’t let that happen,” he says sincerely. “No murderers will find you while I’m around.”

Chastely Jessamine kisses him on the cheek. “Thank you, Corvo,” she says softly. “My heart is at peace when you are near.”

March comes and with it comes sickness. Rats run wild and people begin to be ill. It is a virulent sickness, and soon enough the streets are nearly empty as people hide in fear in their houses. The symptoms are vile, and rats are killed in droves to beat back the plague.

Now Corvo has begun to dream of a soft voice, a seductive voice, calling him from the Void. He follows it, rushing through a dark and tangled labyrinth, and when he awakes he is indeed in a dark alley, just as nightmarish as his dream. For in that alley he is surrounded by the mangled corpses of rats, and there is blood on his hands and teeth.

There is a party the next day and Jessamine and Corvo go together. By a strange circumstance the Outsider is present, and for the first time he speaks to Corvo.

“Hello, Corvo,” he says.

“…Outsider,” Corvo says uneasily. The Outsider never offers his hand to shake and Corvo is off-balance already.

“How do you find the party?” the Outsider asks.

There is a wide circle around them, as if the other attendees avoid them. But no one seems to notice they do it. “It’s fine,” Corvo says. “And you?”

“It’s enough,” the Outsider says. “I only hope that there are no rats.”

“Rats?”

The Outsider smiles at Corvo and taps on his lip. “You missed a spot.”

Corvo dabs at his lip.

His finger comes away bloody.

A mere week later, a half-sunk ship arrives in the bay, carrying a man whose skin is blistered from sunburn, unshaven and weather-beaten. He staggers through the streets, ignoring all help, brandishing the black mark on his hand. And he prophesizes, bellowing that the city is doomed, that they are all dead men walking, hurling words like stones, demanding that he be heard.

He bursts into a lecture hall and that is where Corvo sees him, sees the identical mark he bears, and trembles as he stumbles onto the stage. Foster and Sokolov recognize him and, shaken, demand to know how a man came back from the dead. This is the captain of their ship, Daud, thought dead in the storm that wrecked them in the city.

“He won’t let me die!” Daud roars, pointing up at the Outsider. “Not unless I kill for him! Feed him with blood! He is a god, he walks among us hungry, he is the Leviathan and he will _swallow this city whole_!”

The Outsider merely smiles.

Jessamine’s artifact is a disturbing mask made of gun-gray metal. It certainly does look like a skull, with its empty sockets for eyes and dark slash of a mouth. The grimace seems the very face of death itself. On a whim Corvo tries it on; it fits him as if it was made for him.

“How odd,” Jessamine says, tracing its lines and angles as the mask sits on Corvo’s face. “It truly does fit you well…”

Corvo says nothing, watching her through the cloudy lenses of the mask. Jessamine looks like a ghost. Like a dead woman walking.

At Jessamine’s insistence, he keeps the mask.

He hides it, for he does not know what else to do with the thing. It seems to stare at him no matter where he places it, glare with empty sockets at him as he passes through rooms. The only thing to do is lock the mask in a chest, away from all sight, and pretend it doesn’t exist. But it does exist, and herein lies the trouble: in Corvo’s feverish dreams, cool white hands fit the mask to his face and kiss its metal forehead. From such dreams he wakes discomforted in ways that only Jessamine should discomfort him, and he can only find relief with the quick and filthy work of his hands.

Corvo receives a letter, from the Prophet Daud. Asking to meet. Saying they have something in common, something they must discuss. Corvo is wary, but Jessamine has stars in her eyes when Corvo shows her the letter. “He’ll know secrets,” she says. “I insist you tell him to meet.”

“It could be dangerous,” Corvo points out. “Why me, Jessamine?”

Jessamine clasps his hand. “Let me stand in the room next door, if you’re afraid,” she says. “I can at least stand and listen, and sound the alarm if something is not right.” Perhaps the fever is worse than Corvo believed, because he agrees to Jessamine’s scheme. She will wait in the next room, listening in secret silence from behind a closed door. It is intended as mere reassurance.

But it all goes wrong.

Corvo will never know if Jessamine merely tripped, or slipped against the knob of the door, or even breathed a touch too loudly. Daud is barely through introductions before he is drawing a gun and firing through the door, shouting that they are betrayed.

Jessamine dies in Corvo’s arms.

She is dead, and with her Corvo dies too.

Daud flees into the night, and when Jessamine draws her last breath Corvo is up and after Daud into the night. They run through the darkened city streets, beneath shattered streetlights amid the sound of howling laughter of the mad and the endless squealing of rats in the gutters. Corvo has no weapons, no training.

Yet there is a supernatural strength in his hands when he finally catches up to Daud. They fight, thrashing bodies in the shadows. By some miracle Corvo wrests Daud’s knife from him. Daud stands no chance, not against Corvo’s rage, and he dies with his own knife through his throat.

But where to hide the body?

Corvo drags Daud through the streets, ignoring the way Daud’s blood soaks through Corvo’s coat and vest and shirt. His destination—at first he is unsure, but then he hears the singing. The call of the Void, summoning him. Bringing him to a shrine, hidden in an abandoned tenement full only now of dust.

He heaves Daud up on the altar and drops to his knees, sobbing with shock and grief and rage.

“My dear Corvo,” the Outsider says, soft, compassionate.

“Give her back,” Corvo says roughly, scrubbing his eyes with his sleeve.

The Outsider places one cool hand atop Corvo’s head, a benediction. “I cannot return the dead to life,” he says, “but I can give you this gift…in return for the one you have given me.”

A heart rests in Corvo’s hands, beating slowly, steadily, and in its sounds Corvo hears the whispers of Jessamine’s voice. He presses the treasured object to his chest, heedless of the blood endlessly dripping from its clockworked chambers and onto his hands. “Thank you,” he breathes, gazing up at the Outsider.

“You gave a life to me,” the Outsider murmurs, looking down on Daud. “Give me more, Corvo, my beloved Prophet. Bring me _more_.”

“I can’t…”

“You can.”

“How will I know who to bring?”

The Outsider smiles. “Your beloved Jessamine will tell you.”

_Thaddeus Campbell,_ Jessamine’s voice whispers from the Heart.

With gentle, cool hands, the Outsider fits the mask over Corvo’s face. “Go,” he says, and kisses the metal forehead of the mask.

The city is coming apart at the seams.

Plague rages through the streets. The sick are locked into their houses, but it seems that the disease spreads without a vector. Men wake in the morning well and by noon are dead. Rats, sick and well alike, hurtle through the gutters in horrid numbers.

Earthquakes have begun, shaking the buildings. The tremors crack the cobblestone streets and topple unsteady buildings. Soon enough the city, the dying city, will be rubble.

Corvo barely knows any of it, spending his days as he does in a fevered haze in his bolt-hole. He listens endlessly to the whispers of the Heart, pressing his lips to its pulsating surface. The song of the Void is his constant companion.

And every night, a new name.

_Teague Martin._

_Esma Boyle._

_Farley Havelock._

_Vera Moray. _

_Delilah Copperspoon._

_Treavor Pendleton._

Corvo stalks the streets with Daud’s knife in hand, hunting down those the Outsider demands. He kills them—drops on them from a great height or slashes their bellies open or stabs them through the heart—and brings them back, back to His altar, all for the Outsider.

No one notices the missing, or cares. Those who witness his offerings, Corvo kills. He leaves a trail of blood-soaked bodies behind him, though not as many as the Plague leaves.

Oh, how the Outsider rewards Corvo for his every gift. His hands more clever than Jessamine’s, his mouth sweet, his body pliant. He is everything Corvo wishes and their coupling in the dark is divine in its perfection.

And so the day comes when the streets echo with only the squeak of rats. The last survivors have long since fled, leaving only the dead behind. The dead, and Corvo.

Drawn by the power that has driven all his days, Corvo walks down to the Bay, where the Outsider first came to shore. The sun is setting in the west, beyond the horizon, and silhouetted in the dying light is a monstrous figure. It is massive, large enough to swallow the city whole, and it is drawing nearer every moment.

Corvo falls to his knees.

And the Outsider appears, standing on the water.

“My dear, dear Corvo,” he says, soft as silk, and places his hand on Corvo’s head. A benediction.

Corvo does not, cannot, answer.

The Outsider comes closer, as the thing on the horizon opens its horrible mouth.

“I am so hungry,” he whispers.

He is hungry, and Corvo makes his final offering.


End file.
